


Coward's Dream

by ryure



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Translation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:00:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25432750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryure/pseuds/ryure
Summary: I'm talking about Connor (RK800-5n), which has reached the end of its useful life, and RK900 (Nines), which has a longer service life.There is nothing in that room. Even the color is missing.But yeah, there's an irreplaceable brother in the room. That's all. That's all it's supposed to be.Good morning, sir. Brother.You're here, Nines.I smile at the usual clichés. With both joy and sadness.This is just a ridiculous monologue.The truth is, I'm the only one in the room.I dreamed of one day seeing my brother again, but I knew it wouldn't be possible.Sinful, greedy, your brother.I miss my brother.I shed tears today.I hold you in your cold arms.
Relationships: Connor & Upgraded Connor | RK900, Hank Anderson/Connor
Kudos: 5





	Coward's Dream

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [臆病者の夢物語](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/653272) by ryure. 



The electronically controlled locks are unlocked and more of the old-style locks are removed. After a few more authentications and a few more strict steps, the heavy, thick metal door finally opens. Not one of the windows is opened because it is not necessary, the door is thus sealed, and you step into a room with no ventilation near the ceiling and no air flow. But the lukewarm, stagnant air was no problem, as neither the inhabitants inside nor I needed fresh air.

The room was filled with bright LED light that was left on, and my brother's hair reflected in the white light as he slept, relaxed from the machine.  
It was still very good after all this. The room should remain bright. I don't want to see my brother sleeping like a corpse in a dark room with only a little light coming in through the window. Of course, I can see my brother in the dark without scanning, but even so, a dark room is not desirable.  
My brother is sleeping in the light again today.

“Good morning, brother.”

It authenticates my voiceprint and the signal I sent, and the program starts up without a sound. Without noticing me, my brother slowly got up and picked up the tablet he had thrown out on the bed. Slightly later, the tablet started up as well, and that's when my brother finally noticed me.

“You're here, Nines,”

My brother looked up from his tablet, which he had been watching intently "the whole time” and smiled. I looked at it to see if there was anything wrong with my brother's health, but when I realized that he looked fine, I finally put down the small package I had in my hand.

“Brother, I brought some artificial flowers today.”  
“Artificial flowers?”  
“Yeah, it's a lonely room.”

White walls that indicate cleanliness. Black linoleum floors, a bed of pipes painted white, plain sheets. The only thing outside that can be seen through the rugged frame and thick acrylic windows is the expressionless sky.  
Only the loose-fitting sick clothes worn by my brother have color. It's a dull blue.

This is too bleak for a room where my brother spends the whole day. I brought artificial flowers because fresh flowers are a pain in the ass to clean up, but I hope they provide some comfort to the eyes.

“I hope these will give you some peace of mind.”

My brother didn't know the name of the flower. He absentmindedly launched an app on his tablet, scanned the artificial flowers with the camera on the back of the tablet in his hand, and smiled, "So this is a rose," he said.  
The ability to scan with your eyes has long since been removed from my brother. Now, when he wanted to know something, all my brother could do was rely on some kind of external tool, like a human being, instead of connecting what he saw to the Internet or a database to collate what he saw.  
Even though I couldn't have prolonged my life without doing so, my brother was still proud, in a sense, of being a state-of-the-art android, the predecessor of the investigative assistant called me, and it was a painful sight to see him now.  
But I was the one who had done it. I had no right to think that way. It is my ego that I wanted my brother to live even after I had disgraced him so much.

“Yes. Yes, they were once considered impossible and valuable, but now they are commonplace flowers. Even in the old days, they would have been common as artificial flowers.”  
“Yeah. Nines are very knowledgeable.”  
“Thank you very much.”

No. My brother would not have said anything like that. So what would my brother have said? I assumed, but I couldn't simulate it well because I've spent more time with this brother than I did with "brother" long ago.  
My brother ... has improved somewhat, but his replies are still inorganic. I can say that it's not like my brother. So, you conclude. Because being out of character means you're failing.  
I placed artificial flowers in the empty vase I brought with me, keenly aware of the need to rewrite the program that was assisting my brother's response. No water is needed. It's a flower that won't die.

My brother watched it in silence and in a daze. No, he seemed to be thinking about what he should do or say next based on my actions. But since I'm failing, there is no need to talk about it anymore. Let's get him to sleep.  
He gently pulled out the cable in the back of my brother's neck and he slumped back to sleep. Without the assistance program, my brother no longer acts autonomously. Naturally, at this moment, I always dream of my brother responding without the cable.  
It's a ridiculous idea. It would never happen. 100 percent internal damage rate, malfunctioning. At the same time, the machine's status is stable. I'm sure a scan of my brother would reveal this.

I reached under the bed and pulled out the control board that was hidden from my brother's eyes. As I looked at the tinkling, problem-free lights, I wondered how I could get my brother back to normal.  
When I ripped off the heat sink, the core was easily exposed. I let my fingers detect the amount of heat that the core emits that cannot damage my machine.  
'This,' of course, is not my brother. It's a toy to move my brother. But without it, my brother won't get up and talk to you. He doesn't call me softly Nines, and he never smiles at me.  
But this is not my brother. So where is the heart of the real brother? I thought about the blue flickering light that the base gives off, like the inside of an android's head.

It mimics a human's sleep, the slow breathing, the warmth of his body heat, and it is said that he once slept. But that program was ruthlessly deleted, and my brother, who doesn't need to breathe, now closes his eyes quietly like a corpse. My tears run down my cold cheeks as I cry. I hurriedly wiped the tears away with my fingers.

My brother was my predecessor and prototype. Instead, it was created as a prototype with as many functions and programs as possible to be incorporated into every android.   
He is only natural that the prototype is a test machine to create better androids. He was born with such a curse.

As a result, he was not ordered to stop functioning within its useful life, but as a result of operating it for far more years than it was supposed to, various problems began to take their toll on him.  
At the end of the aging process, many programs that were beyond the scope of normal operation started to operate on their own, or on the contrary, they stopped working, interfered with each other, and because of this, the control of the machine became unsuccessful, and the most important one was the decay of the processing speed.

Of course, adjustments were made to each glitch, and it's not like they didn't do anything about it, such as removing unnecessary programs.  
My brother, in fact, lived a long time in human terms. But for me, it was too short a time. For me, whose useful life was longer than a human life, and who had obtained more years of operation through technological innovation, I was saddened by the fact that my brother could only operate properly for a hundred or so years. I wanted to spend more time with my brother.

He told me that it was enough for him to live such a long life. My brother, who has a more human way of thinking, was satisfied with his own life span, which was equivalent to that of a mere human being.  
But he was kind and considerate when he saw me in my grief. I was always the brother who could not be separated from my brother, and even compared to other RK900s, I was perceived as a troublesome brother, and I was the only destination for his gentle affection.  
I used to cling to him unceremoniously, begging him not to leave me.

"If I was to become a piece of scrap that was never going to say anything at all...”  
“Oh brother, don't say that...”  
"...Nines, you spoiled bratty little crybaby. For example. Such as. It's a long way off.  
I won't be able to connect to the Internet like you guys anymore due to processing speed, and I may be a very old-fashioned, clunky scrap of an android, but that's when things get even more out of control than they already are. Not right now.  
And speaking of old type androids, so is Nines. Even though it's a successor, it's only a few months old. We're the same age now, aren't we?”

Frighteningly, in a distant, human-like manner, my brother chose his words so as not to shock me, and slowly, without restraint, stroked my cheek as tears flowed down my face. My brother's hand brought me the same feel as in the past for a long time, but it was cold, with only enough temperature to keep the parts from freezing at the very least because the pseudo-body temperature program had been removed to mimic a human because it was uncontrollable and could cause a fire.

As my brother said, I am no longer so different from him in the date of manufacture. Nevertheless, this difference in life is because my brother is my brother.  
If my brother weren’t my brother, that is, if he were just an old type of android, it wouldn't be like this.  
Just as I continue to function today. If my brother was just a mass-production model. Unless you're special, a prototype. All you had to do was transfer the memory data to the new machine like all the other mundane androids. Then he would have been able to live longer under the protection of technology.  
But sadly, my brother, if he still had an unused RK800 machine, it would no longer be in working order.

“I've come to the conclusion that I'll have to reset the memory once I move it to a new android due to various programs that are no longer supported tangled in the memory data. Otherwise, it can cause serious problems. You know what I mean?   
Either spend the night with a new android that has some of my records with an incomplete memory transfer, or let me sleep peacefully and quietly, and I'm in a mood to do what I want.  
Nines, choose not to cry any more, you crybaby. Either way, old-school androids who don't want to switch machines are falling asleep more and more these days, and I've lived long enough.”  
“Oh, my brother.”  
“Nines, don't worry. Not for long. For heaven's sake, I've been alive long enough. It's only a matter of time before you crybaby you can't get away with it.”  
“Brother, I don't think I'm going to...”  
“Is that cruel?”  
“Yes, but that's my brother's kindness.”

My brother is no longer in love with living and dying. I knew. The regret was no longer in the world.  
I was the pretender to my brother's regrets. I couldn't be his unrequited love to live at all costs, but my brother's warm brotherly love was directed at me to the extent that he was allowed to freely choose the rest of his life.  
I was the brother who had spent the longest time with my brother, probably because I was RK900 that gave him the most trouble.

“Brother, I'm sure I would have chosen it.”  
“It's not like you don't know what you're talking about.”  
“I know. I feel so guilty.”  
“Guilty...”  
“I'll find a way. I'll find a way for you to live with me. I will find a way. Wait and see. I'll find it. I'm one of those mundane, mass-produced things that aren't state-of-the-art anymore, but I'm just as strong as I can be. Brother. My favorite brother doesn’t leave me behind.”

I gently squeeze my brother's cold hand. My brother, no longer able to move the machine as well as he used to, sat back in the chair where he'd spent most of the day, looked into my eyes and accepted me with resignation.  
I should have sworn.

Not long after that, my brother lost consciousness. It was a symptom of the old computer itself that couldn't start up. It would have been nice if he could have replaced the memory or CPU to boot up, but the CPU that fit his base was an antique.  
And my brother was a special case, so he couldn't take the easy way out. Other than my brother, all the other old-type androids could just casually swap out their newer bodies, and I had stepped into a completely unknown world.

There are, of course, other prototypes androids other than my brother who suffered from the same condition, but they are no longer in a state of speech.  
I had worked so hard to keep my brother alive for so long, and because of the results of my efforts, the prototype android that suffered from the same symptoms and died quietly and helplessly was no longer in the machine. Even that machine no longer existed in this world.  
RK200........except for Markus. The machine of Markus, the leading figure in the revolution, was still in existence. But Markus, like my brother, was also an eccentric "naturalist" who was an eccentric "naturalist" and his consciousness was still absent from this world. I couldn't get any advice from Markus, and the androids close to Markus thought that bringing him back to life would be a desecration of his last will and testament, so they couldn't even get close to him.

It's certainly not that I don't want to respect my brother's idea of just letting things happen and sleeping quietly. It's not that I don't understand the idea. But I couldn't stop my desire to spend time with my brother, and I couldn't lie to him that I still wanted to talk and touch him.

An eccentric, inflexible old type of android. I must have looked pretty pathetic in the eyes of today's "androids", who are no longer completely indistinguishable from humans.  
They scolded me or left words of advice or helped me on a whim, but it was not successful.

Creating an 'imitation' of my brother was easier than cloning extinct animals from prehistoric fossils, but it seemed that what I wanted to do was not to somehow suck the data out of my brother's body and transfer it into a new machine, filling in the gaps with memories to create an imitation of my brother, but to bring my brother back to life, and that seemed impossible.  
Couldn't he bring the dead back to life? Those who have spoken with me will always say. It's not like I can't understand that, but they say it with pity.  
But your brother is not essentially dead. He is a deviant, an android with a mind, but his body is a machine, no matter how far he goes. It's made of plastic, metal, and Thirium310, and has a blue glowing base in its head. So, it might be possible to bring it back to life. I hung on.

In the midst of my disappointment, an "android" listened intently to my story. I didn't say so, though, because by then it was kind of rude to say "androids" to their face.  
He/she was more than ordinarily mechanically savvy, and his/her opinion was dependable. After all, he/she was a former RK900 who had switched to the latest android machine.  
He/She said.

Its predecessor, RK800, was disabled due to both the pressurized prototyping process of mutagenesis and the inability of CYBERLIFE at the time to crack Elijah Kamski's black box, as well as the spaghetti program and age.  
The people who wrote the program are no longer with us, and most of the programs that made up the predecessor RK800 are no longer supported, making it difficult to understand how they interact and work with memory data.  
Furthermore, there is no direct predecessor identified for RK800, and the programs built into it are completely different from those of its direct successor.

It is not possible to solve all the problems immediately because of the complexity of the problem. Furthermore, the current RK900 is uneasy with the current version. It may not be able to be resuscitated, he said. The predecessor RK800 has stopped functioning and ... excuse me, has not been successful since it went to sleep and has never woken up.

So, I recommend that you connect an auxiliary program to the predecessor RK800 to give it a pseudo-personality, or to start the machine by assisting it with residual memory.  
If the main board won't start up, then you should use an auxiliary board connected externally to check the machine's operation. It's well maintained externally, and my scan results are status green, but not all of the internal mechanisms can be scanned. The same is true for the residual memory assisted method. It needs to be tested.

Even today, as technology has advanced, "start-up tests" still exist.  
We advocate that the current RK900 should perform a boot test on its predecessor, RK800.

The former RK900, a new machine with no apparent gender, has since shared with me how to build a rough auxiliary program. He/She" who understood my desire to build it up by myself, wished me well and refrained from further assistance.

I struggled for a while with the data I got from my ex-RK900, and then tried to get my brother's machine running after a long time with the program I had created.  
What I wanted was to restore my brother's mainframe, but I also knew that it was necessary to check the maintenance of the machine and the remaining memory for damage, just like the ex-RK900 said.  
Unfortunately, it also helped me to fulfill a desire, deep in my heart.

As a result, with the help of the auxiliary program, my brother's machine moved easily. At the time, I hadn't yet set up a system to talk to him, and my brother merely opened his eyes and made his upper body twitch slightly, but it was enough to give me the illusion that he was still alive.  
Of course, as long as the machine moved enough to scan the status, my brother hadn't essentially died.

His brother did what he was programmed to do, blinking several times, and then he stopped moving again. I was careful not to interfere with the program that was eating away at my brother's memory, and that was pretty poor programming for an android to have done, and if anything, it would have been smoother if I'd connected to my brother and hacked into him, forcing him to move by taking over the role of the foundation that powered him. But that's not the case.

But that's not the case. I was satisfied to see my brother move as if I hadn't, distracting myself from the fact that I was forcing him to move. It was as if my brother had come to life.  
I didn't want to see my brother connect directly to me and turn me into a puppet, but I wanted to see him move without touching a finger, without connecting. Even if the power source were an auxiliary program I had put together, even if I could see the cables connected to the back of my brother's neck.

My brother woke up for the first time in a long time. It was easy to trick my program.  
Being the "crybaby" that I am, I clung to my brother and cried. I put my ear to his warm fuselage and listened to the bluebloods rumbling more than when they were operating in safe mode with no ego to keep the machine at a minimum.  
My brother chuckled as he watched me squirm as before and didn't comfort me as he stroked my head, but he was definitely there as it started up, starting up every 35.8 seconds, blinking three times every two seconds as programmed, and making five millimeters of body movement.

I then proceeded to make the program more and more complicated. I still couldn't find a way to recover my brother's main infrastructure, but my programming skills, which I assembled without interfering with his main infrastructure programs, kept improving.  
My brother was able to act autonomously to some extent without me having to program him from one to ten, and he was able to respond to some things. However, I had to set up detailed settings for names and other things to call it, and it didn't have a shred of the original CYBERLIFE android-like qualities that allowed it to do unexpected things.

This is the model number that was once considered to be the best android in CYBERLIFE, no matter how old it is. I could have made it work as much as I wanted, and I could have written my brother's style into the bare main board.  
It would have been easy to remotely connect or embed that into my brother's body to create an artificial brother that could move autonomously.

But that's not the case. My wish is to revive my brother. The program I set up was solely for the purpose of assisting him. By inserting the auxiliary program into my brother, it moves him through the somehow living part of the main infrastructure. The auxiliary program does not control my brother. The auxiliary program only helps my brother.  
I told myself that even though I understood that the auxiliary program was getting more and more complicated and that it was taking up a larger and larger percentage of my brother's time. My brother's main infrastructure, which is the equivalent of forcing it to run, had become even more worn out and worn out with age, and the percentage of auxiliary programs was increasing at an accelerated rate.

If you're thinking about reviving my brother, you should stop forcing him to wake up. My brother's base was worn out to the point that it couldn't be booted up by any legitimate means, and it would have shown more signs of rebooting than my brother's, even if it was the base of an android that had once been sent to the recall center and had been violently shut down.

And yet, I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop my brother from smiling at me, and I couldn't stop him from talking to me in his voice. To make it stop. I was only forcing him to do it, even though I knew it was only me, even though his will and soul were not there at the earliest.

My brother was worn out, and the main foundation finally stopped working altogether, and yet I kept him going with the tension I insisted on calling the "auxiliary program". I was frustrated that my own wear and tear could be fixed with a modern repair, but not my brother's.

In order to make his autonomous behavior more "brotherly," I cut back on his functions. What's the difference between that and the reconstruction of the "brotherhood" that I had deemed contraindicated?  
As long as he could answer questions and make light movements, he was like my brother. Because even in his later years, his brother couldn't move around that much. So, before I knew it, I had created a ghost of my brother on the bed in the sealed room.

His warm spirit will no longer exist in this world. He would never come back. I knew that he would never return, but I pretended that I didn't understand.  
My desires had deteriorated the inner workings of the machine, and all of its remaining memory was no longer readable. I had the backup data, but there was no way to reboot except to replace the base with a completely new one. And there was no way I could find a new board that would be compatible with RK800....  
Even if it did, I was dreaming of it.  
  
But even now, the cold dead body with my brother's face and his voice is still with me. The gentle and cruel mercy that my brother left me before he died made me greedy.

I am surely to be damned. I should be admonished. But no eccentric person ever bothered to step into the complete world of the two of us, so I will probably make my brother a puppet forever. Until I stop functioning due to an unforeseen accident. I hoped that day wouldn't come, and at the same time I hoped that my sinful behavior would stop soon.

“Good morning, brother.”  
“Good morning Nines. You're here again today.”  
“I like coming here. Please don't mind me. Brother. How are you today?”  
“As usual, you can't get away from your brother...”  
  
My brother stroked my head to stir my head as I sobbed and squirmed in annoyance, and he smiled at me, just like he did that day. Ah. My brother is here.

No, he's not here. What I'm seeing is the ghost of my brother that I made up. If my brother were here, he would have cheered me up.

Crying more and more, I gently pull the cable out of him. Scratching my beloved machine, which had lost its signal and had stopped moving, I wondered to myself why I hadn't chased after my brother that day when he had stopped functioning.   
If only I had lined up my thorium pump regulator next to my brother's dead body. If only I had gone to my brother's side. I'm sure he wouldn't have accepted it right away and would have scolded me severely. Still, I wouldn't have been so sinful.

I could no longer stand on my feet, and today I sleep on my brother's chest.

A petal falls soundlessly from the only made up blue rose that sees me in a hapless and inadequate state.


End file.
